"Whistlin' and Crowin' Women of Appalachia" turns what everybody knows and takes for granted into explicit facts of the experiences and lives of these women. The discourse of the everyday person is transformed, changed by being written into self-aware iscourse, both empowered and empowering. Katherine Kelleher Sohn's descriptions of the difficulties of balancing work, job, classes, and marriage ring true and will resonate with women in many different environments."
"Whistlin' and Crowin' Women of Appalachia" turns what everybody knows and takes for granted into explicit facts of the experiences and lives of these women. The discourse of the everyday person is transformed, changed by being written into self-aware iscourse, both empowered and empowering. Katherine Kelleher Sohn's descriptions of the difficulties of balancing work, job, classes, and marriage ring true and will resonate with women in many different environments."
Appalachia faces overwhelming challenges that plague many rural areas across the country, including poorly funded schools, stagnant economic development, corrupt political systems, poverty, and drug abuse. Its citizens, in turn, have often been the target of unkind characterizations depicting them as illiterate or backward. Despite entrenched social and economic disadvantages, the region is also known for its strong sense of culture, language, and community. In this innovative volume, a multidisciplinary team of both established and rising scholars challenge Appalachian stereotypes through an examination of language and rhetoric. Together, the contributors offer a new perspective on Appalachia and its literacy, hoping to counteract essentialist or class-based arguments about the region's people, and reexamine past research in the context of researcher bias. Featuring a mix of traditional scholarship and personal narratives, Rereading Appalachia assesses a number of pressing topics, including the struggles of first-generation college students and the pressure to leave the area in search of higher-quality jobs, prejudice toward the LGBT community, and the emergence of Appalachian and Affrilachian art in urban communities. The volume also offers rich historical perspectives on issues such as the intended and unintended consequences of education activist Cora Wilson Stewart's campaign to promote literacy at the Kentucky Moonlight Schools. A call to arms for those studying the heritage and culture of Appalachia, this timely collection provides fresh perspectives on the region, its people, and their literacy beliefs and practices.
Tradition, community, and pride are fundamental aspects of the history of Appalachia, and the language of the region is a living testament to its rich heritage. Despite the persistence of unflattering stereotypes and cultural discrimination associated with their style of speech, Appalachians have organized to preserve regional dialects -- complex forms of English peppered with words, phrases, and pronunciations unique to the area and its people. Talking Appalachian examines these distinctive speech varieties and emphasizes their role in expressing local history and promoting a shared identity. Beginning with a historical and geographical overview of the region that analyzes the origins of its dialects, this volume features detailed research and local case studies investigating their use. The contributors explore a variety of subjects, including the success of African American Appalachian English and southern Appalachian English speakers in professional and corporate positions. In addition, editors Amy D. Clark and Nancy M. Hayward provide excerpts from essays, poetry, short fiction, and novels to illustrate usage. With contributions from well-known authors such as George Ella Lyon and Silas House, this balanced collection is the most comprehensive, accessible study of Appalachian language available today.
In this work the various ways that social, economic, and cultural factors influence the identities and educational aspirations of rural working-class Appalachian learners are explored. The objectives are to highlight the cultural obstacles that impact the intellectual development of such students and to address how these cultural roadblocks make transitioning into college difficult. Throughout the book, the author draws upon his personal experiences as a first-generation college student from a small coalmining town in rural West Virginia. Both scholarly and personal, the book blends critical theory, ethnographic research, and personal narrative to demonstrate how family work histories and community expectations both shape and limit the academic goals of potential Appalachian college students.
The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English is a revised and expanded edition of the Weatherford Award–winning Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, published in 2005 and known in Appalachian studies circles as the most comprehensive reference work dedicated to Appalachian vernacular and linguistic practice. Editors Michael B. Montgomery and Jennifer K. N. Heinmiller document the variety of English used in parts of eight states, ranging from West Virginia to Georgia—an expansion of the first edition's geography, which was limited primarily to North Carolina and Tennessee—and include over 10,000 entries drawn from over 2,200 sources. The entries include approximately 35,000 citations to provide the reader with historical context, meaning, and usage. Around 1,600 of those examples are from letters written by Civil War soldiers and their family members, and another 4,000 are taken from regional oral history recordings. Decades in the making, the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English surpasses the original by thousands of entries. There is no work of this magnitude available that so completely illustrates the rich language of the Smoky Mountains and Southern Appalachia.
Path-breaking research on women and literacy in the past decade established conventions and advanced innovative methods that push the making of knowledge into new spheres of inquiry. Taking these accomplishments as a point of departure, this volume emphasizes the diversity—of approaches and subjects—that characterizes the next generation of research on women and literacy. It builds on and critiques scholarship in literacy studies, composition studies, rhetorical theory, gender studies, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies to open new venues for future research. Contributors discuss what literacy is—more precisely, what literacies are—but their strongest interest is in documenting and theorizing women’s lived experience of these literacies, with particular attention to: the diversity of women’s literacies within the U.S., including but not limited to the varying relations that exist among women, literacy, economic position, class, race, sexuality, and education; relations among women, literacy, and economic contexts in the U.S. and abroad, including but not limited to changes in women’s private and domestic literacies, the evolution of technologies of literacy, and women’s experience of the commodification of literacies; and emergent roles of women and literacy in a globally interdependent world. This broad, significant work is a must-read for researchers and graduate students across the fields of literacy studies, composition studies, rhetorical theory, and gender studies.
Front cover -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 Revisiting Appalachia, Revisiting Self -- 2 Carolina Chocolate Drops -- 3 Beyond a Wife's Perspective on Politics -- 4 Intersections of Appalachian Identity -- 5 Appalachia Beyond the Mountains -- 6 Digital Rhetorics of Appalachia and the Cultural Studies Classroom -- 7 Continuity and Change of English Consonants in Appalachia -- 8 Frackonomics -- 9 Revisiting Appalachian Icons in the Production and Consumption of Tourist Art -- 10 From the Coal Mine to the Prison Yard -- 11 Walking the Fence Line of The Crooked Road -- 12 "No One's Ever Talked to Us Before" -- 13 Strength in Numbers -- 14 When Collaboration Leads to Action -- 15 Participation and Transformation in Twenty-First-Century Appalachian Scholarship -- (Re)introduction -- Appendix -- Contributors -- Index.
Rural Literacies identifies the problems inherent in trying to understand rural literacy, addresses the lack of substantive research on literacy in rural areas, and reviews traditional misrepresentations of rural literacy. This innovative volume frames debates over literacy in relation to larger social, political, and economic forces, such as the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on rural schools and the effects of out-migration, globalization, and the loss of small family farms on rural communities. Drawing upon traditional literacy and composition research and employing theory from education and sociology, the text engages compositionists in broader conversations regarding rural literacies. The authors share strategies that will help compositionists participate in pedagogies that are rooted in a richer understanding of rural literacies and work toward sustainability for all communities in a globalized age.
When her mother passed along a cookbook made and assembled by her grandmother, Erica Abrams Locklear thought she knew what to expect. But rather than finding a homemade cookbook full of apple stack cake, leather britches, pickled watermelon, or other “traditional” mountain recipes, Locklear discovered recipes for devil’s food cake with coconut icing, grape catsup, and fig pickles. Some recipes even relied on food products like Bisquick, Swans Down flour, and Calumet baking powder. Where, Locklear wondered, did her Appalachian food script come from? And what implicit judgments had she made about her grandmother based on the foods she imagined she would have been interested in cooking? Appalachia on the Table argues, in part, that since the conception of Appalachia as a distinctly different region from the rest of the South and the United States, the foods associated with the region and its people have often been used to socially categorize and stigmatize mountain people. Rather than investigate the actual foods consumed in Appalachia, Locklear instead focuses on the representations of foods consumed, implied moral judgments about those foods, and how those judgments shape reader perceptions of those depicted. The question at the core of Locklear’s analysis asks, How did the dominant culinary narrative of the region come into existence and what consequences has that narrative had for people in the mountains?
